Practice Performance Partners

The first thing Dr. Raley impressed upon us was that she feels that no doctor can handle compliance on their own — staying up to date with the latest laws and regulations surrounding HIPAA, OSHA, and other compliance areas is a full-time job: “I’m definitely not an expert and I don’t want to be. I just want to align myself with professionals who are experts and leverage the resources that are available to me.” To that end, she said that PCS is the perfect partner for her practice. To start, they made onboarding seamless. After filling out some simple questionnaires, the rest was done for her. “They were able to take all of my answers to the questions and then build out a personalized app for the office where all of our documents live,” she said. About one year after she started with PCS, Dr. Raley had them come out to her practice for an on-site compliance audit. She told us, “The on-site visit was extremely helpful because it laid out exactly what we needed to address. There are simple, actionable items and things that you can do, and it doesn’t feel like it’s this huge stressful situation because they make it so easy.”

The thing I always tell people is, ‘you think you’re doing a pretty good job until somebody comes along and tells you that you missed out on $70,000 last year because of incorrect billing.’ That’s substantial. I think that ODs don’t really know what they’re missing until they trust somebody that knows what to look for.

There was a time when Dr. Scholten-Lellbach had no formalized, or in her words “good,” compliance plan. She was solid on HIPAA, but perhaps a bit shakier on OSHA and fraud defense. “We knew about compliance, but we underestimated it. It was not a good business plan, let’s put it that way.” When Dr. Scholten-Lellbach visited the PCS booth in an industry trade show’s exhibit hall, she wasn’t thinking about compliance — but after just a few minutes hearing from PCS President Dr. Joe DeLoach, a longtime eye doctor turned passionate compliance advocate, it became one of her biggest priorities. It was Dr. DeLoach’s combination of compliance knowledge and optometry practice know-how that sold Dr. Scholten-Lellbach on PCS. “Just speaking with Joe, getting the basic information on compliance and specifics about what that means for eye doctors… that was what started it all.”

Dr. Drake said that prior to using PCS, she struggled to understand what she needed to do to stay in compliance, no matter how many compliance groups she spoke with or talks she attended. As she recalled, “We had very little going on, as far as compliance. Like most optometry practices, we didn’t really know what we were supposed to comply with.” All that changed when, after Dr. Drake attended an education session offered by PCS about the importance of consistent compliance and the consequences of letting it lapse, she made the leap to adopt PCS. In no time, she understood there was far more she should be doing when it came to HIPAA, OSHA, and other compliance areas — and that PCS allowed her to get it all done in one place: “It’s pretty much all-in-one, and it’s helped us to do this all a lot easier.”